A Doctor of Veterinary Medicine with Prairie Swine Health Services says animal officials in Manitoba remain committed to eliminating PED from the province.
The Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea outbreak that hit southern Manitoba last April was discussed last week as part of a Swine Innovation Porc session held in conjunction with the Banff Pork Seminar.
Dr. Egan Brockhoff, a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine with Prairie Swine Health Services, says the province of Manitoba's veterinary team has done remarkable work responding to the outbreak, with Manitoba Pork leading the drive on getting things done, the whole veterinary community coming together and working on this and the producers themselves talking about their cases and being transparent to help everyone find ways to slow this down and stop it.

Clip-Dr. Egan Brockhoff-Prairie Swine Health Services:
So this disease has really slowed down right now.
We haven't had a new case since October 24th in Manitoba.
That's great news.
We are going into the winter and this is a difficult time of year to clean and wash trailers and to follow those protocols so people have to really be aware of that.
When we talk about disease prevention we're often talking about biosecurity and the biosecurity protocols that are in place to minimize disease risk and so with this disease, like many other diseases, you have to get the community together and talk about biosecurity, making sure people are following the protocols and getting things done properly.
The area that was affected, there was a significant amount of pigs affected and so there's a lot of immunity in that area that wasn't there before and that's going to help prevent the disease from ramping up into the season as well.
We bring all this tings together and, through hard work and solid diligence we could have a fairly peaceful winter.

Dr. Brockhoff says everyone is still very much focused on elimination, and everyone understands there's little things we need to keep doing around biosecurity and managing people and pig flow to keep those risks as low as possible.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.